Rethinking Topic Theory: An Essay on the Recent History of a Music Theory
Music Theory Online 30, no. 1 (Spring 2024), doi:10.30535/mto.30.1.9. This essay gives a critical history of Anglophone topic theory as it evolved between the publication of Leonard Ratner’s Classic Music (1980) and The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory (Mirka 2014). Throughout this period, topic theory transformed from the identification of “characteristic figures” in eighteenth-century music into an analytical strategy for the intersubjective verification of correspondences between musical signifiers and extramusical meaning....